Modern disk drives store data in blocks with a fixed size. The physical block in a drive are termed sectors. The sectors are arranged in tracks, each track having a fixed number of sectors, and the tracks are arranged in cylinders. Many of today's magnetic disk drives employ zone recording, where all tracks within a zone have the same number of sectors per track. The sectors may be skewed from track to track and from cylinder to cylinder.
These disk drive parameters, namely, a number of tracks per cylinder, number of zones, number of sectors per track in each zone, track skew, and cylinder skew, define the data layout geometry of a disk drive. These parameters affect the performance characteristics of a disk drive. An additional parameter that affects the disk drive performance is the drive's rotational speed. A need arises for a technique with which these disk drive parameters may be quickly and easily determined, for any disk drive encountered.